Malaysian property developer Sime Darby Property (SDP), a part of Malaysia's Sime Darby group, is enhancing operations and transforming the customer experience through cloud migration.
The company, with 25 ongoing townships and developments across the country, aimed to expand its digital capabilities beyond administrative tasks and use automation wherever possible.
It embarked on a group-wide digital transformation in 2020 to become an agile, data-driven organisation. As the first step, it migrated all its on-premises data centres to the Azure cloud.
SDP’s general manager of digital and information technology, Stevensan Innasimuthu, said his firm has now migrated 98 percent of its servers to Azure, reducing the IT budget by more than 30 percent.
The migration has “largely” benefitted SDP’s IT team, reducing most of their workloads, he said.
“It now only takes us about 15 to 20 minutes to provision a server and the required services, which would be three or four days, otherwise,” he added.
The team has also automated the manual workload of handling property launches and online sales through an internal online booking system.
“It requires a lot of computing power, but we can optimise the output with Microsoft Kubernetes that adjusts automatically, allowing us to scale up or down in less than 10 minutes,” Innasimuthu explained.
Seamless integration
SDP’s Prime app which provides customers with updates and inspections on their properties, is integrated with Azure to look into communications with the internal inspection team and contractors.
For instance, customers can report any defects or repairs which are directed “automatically” to the relevant contractors.
Innasimuthu said Prime collects customer feedback to make data-driven decisions. “Whether switching construction materials or changing designs based on reviews from past property owners, SDP is able to optimise its new builds using this data,” he added.
The company is currently exploring Microsoft’s Power Automate to implement machine learning and no-code methodology. “We have plans to further enhance security and integrate with other platforms for even better connectivity,” he said.
